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I have several apple products but I'm not married to them. I'm looking to stream movies and TV will most likely never play a game. They are both around the same price wise so I'm wanting to hear of anyone's experiences with either. pro and con.Rob

I've got both, but tend to use the AppleTV, mostly for Netflix and watching movies from iTunes if I want to rent something newer.

Roku is definitely more 'open', but most of the content available beyond Netflix and Amazon Content is useless, at least to me.

Also, if you have iPads or iPhones, then appleTV is the way to go. You can just broadcast from the device screen directly to the TV, listen to music, play games, look at pictures, etc on it.

They both work very well and are fairly slick inexpensive devices in my opinion, but overall the appleTV works better. Because I have totally bought into the apple ecosystem, so appleTV works better for me.

i use the Amazon Prime (free streaming of LOTS of TV and movie as well as the shipping %) channel and the Pandora channel on our roku the most...but the amount of "private" channels offered is amazing......

My 2 cents worth. If I didn't have Apple laptop & iPhone I'd choose streaming box by the GUI. They are quite different.

But I do use Mac OS and iOS devices and the stuff you can do through the iTV is great. Play music. Anything that's on the iPhone from anywhere in the house. You can put up your laptop screen. I enjoy displaying photos and videos that are not on the web this way. Great for looking at maps with more than one person.

You can do all this stuff with other gear, but it's just so easy with this integrated stuff.

The Roku and now the iTV are probably the best home electronics purchases I can remember. They both work great.

this quote works for me "The other option was Apple TV, which sells for $99. It gives you fewer content choices, but the ones that are available are high-quality. Yes, it’s got Netflix and Hulu Plus, though there’s no Amazon Instant Video selection – and given that Amazon and Apple are competing head-on with video and music content, there likely never will be one."So..if you use Amazon than you want to look to the Roku

I started with a Roku. I loved it and still use them in the kids room and in the gym. My problem with the Roku is that there are some shows that are not available on the roku through Hulu +(general hospital for the wife) I decided to look into a Home Theater PC.

I bough an Acer mini tower and hooked it up to the living room tv(which i'm using now). The tower is about the size of a WII and sits under the tv. A cordless keyboard performs all the functions needed. I did buy a small hand held keyboard with a roller ball for a mouse, it was like typing on a flip phone.. kinda cool but not good for typing in forums. picked up a $20 wiresless full size keyboard with touch pad from walmart and haven't looked back.

The pc was about $300, it has 5 usb hook ups and a sd card drive built in. I bought an external dvd player for $30 so we can watch other movies. 160gig hard drive is not the biggest but is big enough for my pics and music.

The bonus to using the PC is that ALL MATERIAL is available to you on your tv. Plus you get a 40inch monitor! it is also nice to view pics and stream music in the living room. I had it all hooked into the surround sound for awhile, but needed the speakers for my cousins parade float and never reinstalled everything.

I would highly recommend it at least for the MAIN tv in the house. The Roku has been GREAT for the other tvs! I have bought for or had at least 8 people buy rokus after trying it. $20 for hulu and netflix sure beats $65 for cable! My wife has been hinting that maybe we should get cable again... we went on vacation last week...... SHE DOESN"T WANT CABLE ANYMORE! It's like TIVO on STEROIDS!

hope this helps.. if you have any questions, feel free to ask or search HTPC online

Right now can stream from Google Play, Youtube and Neflix. Can also show a Chrome tab so it can play free Hulu. The leap of faith is what will be added in the future. As I read, Redbox Instant and HBO Go are jumping on board (the API is free from Google so pretty much anyone can stream content). The nice thing is that it streams on it's own and you can use pretty much any device so start the stream.

It will also allow local streaming of mp4 videos/movies from a Chrome tab.

Broadband bandwidth isn't a big deal to just get streaming to work, the buffering of the video takes a bit longer. It mainly effects picture quality. If you have a high end tv and want your streaming video to look as much like DVD as possible, then increase your bandwidth. It also depends on how much other activity you have going on around your house. With the old, smaller, DSL connection I could freeze the streaming by downloading a bunch of pictures. With the bigger pipe, I never had the issue.

Thanks ! great help. I have a 25 dollar best buy card to use so I'll be buying there. I thought about chrome but I'm not sure if I'll need external power for it . My wife is wanting cleaner looking systems . I've given up on my high end stereo systems as way to much of space hogs. I'll look at chrome again but leaning toward Roku with the headphone option .

I bough an Acer mini tower and hooked it up to the living room tv(which i'm using now). The tower is about the size of a WII and sits under the tv. A cordless keyboard performs all the functions needed. I did buy a small hand held keyboard with a roller ball for a mouse, it was like typing on a flip phone.. kinda cool but not good for typing in forums. picked up a $20 wiresless full size keyboard with touch pad from walmart and haven't looked back.

The pc was about $300, it has 5 usb hook ups and a sd card drive built in. I bought an external dvd player for $30 so we can watch other movies. 160gig hard drive is not the biggest but is big enough for my pics and music.

The bonus to using the PC is that ALL MATERIAL is available to you on your tv. Plus you get a 40inch monitor! it is also nice to view pics and stream music in the living room. I had it all hooked into the surround sound for awhile, but needed the speakers for my cousins parade float and never reinstalled everything.

That's what I meant by "you can do all this stuff with other gear".

It's just the Apple stuff is so tightly integrated there's pretty much no setup or UI issues (or cables). Of course, you need fancy Apple HW. Luckily mine comes from work. You can do most of that stuff from the iPhone, which I did between jobs.

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